


Elegy for a Wooden Girl

by lumailia



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Faerghus but make it more french, Gen, Implied Character Death, Mentions of Death, Rhea is a nun that's fun, fairy tale, fodlans fables, slight AU, this is angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-18 05:22:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28987038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lumailia/pseuds/lumailia
Summary: Gilbert's dangerous prayer, and the sky that answered.OR:A Faerghus-centric retelling of "Pinocchio" for the Foldan's Fables zine
Relationships: Annette Fantine Dominic's Mother/Gilbert Pronislav
Comments: 2
Kudos: 23





	Elegy for a Wooden Girl

**Author's Note:**

> It was such an honor being part of the Foldan Fables zine!!! The work therein is INCREDIBLE and I can't thank the mods enough for all their hard work. They're truly a class act and deserve ALL the recognition, so go spam them with love on twitter @fodlansfables .

**_Elegy for a Wooden Girl_ **

Inspired by _Pinocchio,_ the children’s folk tale by Carlo Collodi (ca. Italy, 1881)

Winter in _les alpes_ was called the starving season. By the first snowfall, the earth leaned to short yellow grasses, the soil crystallized in frost. The sun, when it shone, was sparse and fragile, bleeding deep cobalt shadows from the trees. The wind lashed endlessly. Mercilessly. Muscle weaned from bone—bone grew brittle. Bellies swelled with water, tenting ragged coats over narrow bodies. (The snow could fill a mouth, but not a stomach.) Only the King and his Knights, shielded in _La Grande Palais_ , did not go hungry.

But Gustave Dominic had left Knighthood for a woman. Fantine Charpentier, with her mulled honey hair and luminous smile, snagged him by the collar of his armor and pulled him all the way to the frigid peaks of Gautier, where he took up work at a woodshop and gave her a child by the spring. When she died, it took six hours to dig her grave from the frozen earth.

The night he buried his wife, Gustave slipped back into the apartment quietly, but little Annette was awake, hunched on the windowsill in the hearth room with a thin yarn blanket around her arms. Moonlight drew out her frame in haphazard strokes, painting the rest of her in frostbitten blue. Gustave couldn’t look at her long, so he looked at the window. A bright star winked in the top left pane, knowing something he did not.

“I made up a Saints-psalm while you were gone,” said Annette. Gustave still could not glimpse her. He went over and stoked the fire, which had dimmed to a weary glow among the coals. “Would you like to hear it?”

The flames ribboned up, then withered. He needed matches. “Of course, dear.”

Annette cleared her throat. Her voice, so sweet and spooling during the warmer months, rang glassy, weakened with grief and cold. When it cracked, Gustave struck a match to hide the sound.

Ten days later, the fever stopped her singing for good.

Gustave did not sleep those nights. He sat beside her bed with a pail on his knees and watched her boil in her own chills, watched her cheeks bowl in and her skin sallow, watched the winter begin to claim her. Every night, she grew thinner. Every night, he grew older, new stripes of gray marching down his russet hair. 

On the fifth night, Annette closed her eyes. She was breathing, gently, but it would not be long before it stopped. The star in the window glowed brighter, closer.

Gustave packed nothing in his saddlebag. Their horse—Basso, Fantine named him—waited patiently at his hitching post near the back fence. “I am a coward,” Gustave whispered to him as he affixed his saddle. Then he mounted Basso, and he ran. He ran from Annette, and the clouds ran with him, covering the star, weeping bitter, wet snow as the wind through the mountains sang her elegy.

***

When Gustave arrived at La Palais, the first thing King Lambert gave him was a meal: plain boiled meat, lardy potatoes, and enough mulberry wine to thoroughly drown himself with. He took deep sips of the wine, savoring its numbing warmth, yet little but pushed around the food. King Lambert and his son, Prince Dimitri—a blond, girlish-looking boy—watched him curiously between bites.

Gustave told himself Annette would not have lived. She was so small, so frail; the cold would’ve taken her before they reached the first valley. He thought of her skeletal cheeks and shoved his untouched meat towards the princeling. “A boy needs to eat,” he said.

Lambert nodded, encouraging, and Dimitri took the bowl and thanked him. 

“I’d like to make an offer,” Lambert interjected. He poured Gustave a third glass of wine. “A return to my forces. The Knights have sorely missed your leadership.”

“I am not apt for fighting, Your Grace,” said Gustave.

“That is the hunger talking.”

Guilt gripped his chest like an icy fist. “I mean nothing of my constitution,” he said. “If I might be of help in other ways, however…I would accept. I was a woodworker in Gautier.”

Lambert smirked. Gustave had never told the King where he’d gone when he married Fantine. “Very well,” said Lambert. “The stables could use another hand, and there’s a woodshop in the annex, should we need any carpentry.”

“Then I accept.”

Lambert held out his glass in a silent toast. But Gustave’s gaze was on Dimitri, whose blue, lucent eyes reminded him so intensely of Annette’s.

***

In the morning, Lambert brought Gustave into the woodshop. A bright, dusty place, thick with the smell of sawdust and varnish. Familiar tools rested among a menagerie of unfinished projects. These were things Gustave could fix. Things he could lose himself in. He took the saw and chisel and carved away at the days, watching the past fall in dry, delicate shavings, and only pretended not to notice when he tracked them out of the woodshop on his boots.

***

Spring finally touched _les alpes_ at the first of May, bringing longer days and sugary daffodils, and while winter held fast to the wind, neither the daffodils nor the children at La Palais seemed to mind.

A tangle of piping voices drew Gustave around a corner hedge in the garden. It was the princeling, play-fighting with the ruddy-faced sons of two visiting dukes. Ingrid, the daughter of a third, watched the boys from a bench beside the flowerbeds, an anticipatory grip on her own wooden sword. She was Annette’s age—but she was healthy. Alive. Gustave imagined himself burying her and shuddered. 

“Sir Gustave!” Dimitri called. Gustave paced across the garden, tamping down his morbid thoughts. “Sir Gustave, did you know my friends are here for the Day of the Star?”

“It’s my favorite holiday,” Ingrid said. For such a small girl, her voice was a jarring alto. “I’m already thinking about my wish for the North star. That’s a Saint’s-star, did you know?”

He nodded.

“You simply _have_ to make a wish, Sir Gustave,” she pushed. “The Saint’s-stars bring us blessings against death.”

***

Three years later, Gustave left _La Palais_ for a convent school in the valley, led by a single nun called Mother Rhea—though she did not look old enough to be any kind of mother. She was tall and broad-hipped and wore her hair tucked beneath a headdress, spare a thin curlicue of blond that greened in the stained-glass colors of the cathedral.

“Sir Gustave,” she said as he entered, giving a slight bow. “A pleasure.”

“Call me Gilbert. Gilbert Pronislav,” he replied. He’d tried the new name before, in front of the mirror, but using it with Rhea left a slickness on his tongue. 

“Sir Gilbert, then. What a blessing to have you here. The King has spoken highly of your skills,” she said.

“His Highness recommended me?”

“Of course. How else would I have known you were honest?” she mused, and she gave him a strange, flickering smile that told Gustave— _Gilbert_ —she either knew nothing of him, or everything.

***

The woodshop at the convent was a cramped, dark shed near the stables. By day, Gilbert worked in the light of a single window, and by night, a host of hanging lanterns, their flames beating restlessly against the glass. He made classroom chairs, mostly. And birdhouses. Then between them, arms. Legs. Joints. A head with his own ample forehead and Fantine’s button nose. He mixed ale and sassafras bark to dye straw to the color of his hair. Fishing line made for excellent strings. But the eyes he painted himself, spending hours mixing pigments to the perfect watery blue.

The marionette wasn’t a proper one. Those were wrought in the ateliers, sculpted under the careful hands of artists—which Gilbert was certainly not. But he was a lonely man with an aching heart, and he supposed that was enough in common for him to impost within their ranks.

Gilbert sat his creation in the small guest’s chair beneath his window. He could never style the hair the way Fantine did, two tomato buns at the base of her neck, but if he glimpsed the puppet out of the corner of his eye, he could almost believe Annette was there, watching the Saint’s-star and warming her voice to sing.

It was not the Day of the Star. Not yet. But Gilbert looked to the Northern sky and wished upon it, anyway.

***

The next morning, Gilbert awoke to a finger poking at his cheek.

He jolted and rolled over. Blinked a few times, easing the fog out of his eyes. His sweet Annette, clothed in the puppet’s same white shift, stood alive at his bedside.

Gilbert clutched at his nightshirt; his heartbeat thundered against the curl of his knuckles. “Saints above, am I home at last?”

“Your hair’s gotten so gray, Papá,” said Annette. Deep seams lined her chin, unhinging her bottom lip as she spoke. “I’ve missed you.”

Tears blurred his vision. “Where is your mother? My Fantine?”

“I don’t know. Won’t you show me around?”

He leapt from the bed and embraced her, expecting the give of flesh to meet his arms—not the same smooth pinewood he’d chiseled months ago. He drew away, but the marionette held on, her bloodless hands flexed across his back. She looked up, her chin pointed into his stomach, and _smiled._

***

“What a terrible waste of a prayer.”

Gilbert had never seen such derision, such unadulterated _anger,_ on Rhea’s face, yet she looked upon his puppet-daughter as if she were the Devil reborn.

“I’d like to be a real girl, one day,” Annette chirped, unperturbed. “Could my papá wish for that, too?”

Rhea took Annette’s wrist in her hand. Studied it. When she looked back at Gilbert, an unsettling light shone in her eyes.

“You will repent for this,” she seethed. “I should have you hanged. Burned. But that would be merciful, and mercy is not what you deserve.”

She dropped Annette’s wrist, and Gilbert took it swiftly, twining her fingers with his own. “Then what shall you do?”

“Imprison you. Here, in your quarters. Cyril will bring you your meals, and you may go to the woodshop, if you wish, but otherwise, you’ll go nowhere. Not with _that_.”

Gilbert would hear no more. He retreated with Annette tucked under his arm and vowed Rhea would never see her again.

He refused to let her suffer, though. He had Cyril bring her books, puzzles, but she was human enough to remain unsatisfied. Each day, she asked him to meet the girls she saw playing outside the window, and every time, he had to deny her. In that way, Rhea was right: what would they think of a girl like her? They were flesh and she was wood, and though she was alive, she would never be real.

Winter came early that year, rushing down from the mountains like an avalanche. All the convent girls went out to play in the snow, and Annette watched them from the window, her body clattering with tearless sobs of envy. Gilbert, helpless to comfort her, stood silent.

On the fifth night of her misery, Gilbert wished for her weeping to end—and by dawn, she was a puppet once more.

***

In summer, two noble girls arrived at the convent—the best of friends, per Rhea’s account. Gilbert was set to meet them at a schoolwide supper, but saw them instead in the gardens, their backs kept turned to him as they picked sprigs of lavender and whispered to each other.

Gilbert thought little of them until the smaller girl, the redhead, started singing.

She spun through her song, arms thrown wide, but stopped as she caught Gustave’s eye. Lowered her arms. Gustave’s stomach dropped—it was impossible. He looked for the seams on her face, the ball joint that swelled her neck, but there was only flesh, rosy against her uniform’s stiff linen collar. She was no longer hungry.

She would never forgive him.


End file.
